Well there’s two different layers of discussions that people mix together. One is the discussion in abstract about what it means to be human, the limits of our physical existence, the hubris of technological advancement, the feasibility of singularity, etc… I have opinions here for sure, but the whole topic is open ended and multipolar.

The other is the tangible: the datacenter building, oil burning, water wasting, slop creating, culture exploiting, propoganda manufacturing reality. Here there’s barely any ethical wiggle room and you’re either honest or deluding yourself. But the mere existence of generative Ai can still drive some interesting, if niche, debates (ownership of information, trust in authority and narrative, the cost of convenience…).

So there are different readings of the original meme depending on where you’re coming from:

• A deconstruction of the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence – funny
• A jab at all techbros selling an AGI singularity – pretty good
• Painting anyone with an interest in LLM as an idiot – meh

I don’t think it’s contrarian to like some of those readings/discussions but still be disappointed in the usual shouting matches.

Love the meme but also hate the drivel that fills the comment sections on these types of things. People immediately start talking past each other. Half state unquantifiable assertions as fact (“…a computer doesn’t, like, know what an apple is maaan…”) and half pretend that making a sufficiently complex model of the human mind lets them ignore the Hard Problems of Consciousness (“…but, like, what if we just gave it a bigger context window…”).

It’s actually pretty fun to theorize if you ditch the tribalism. Stuff like the physical constraints of the human brain, what an “artificial mind” could be and what making one could mean practically/philosophically. There’s a lot of interesting research and analysis out there and it can help any of us grapple with the human condition.

But alas, we can’t have that. An LLM can be a semi-interesting toy to spark a discussion but everyone has some kind of Pavlovian reaction to the topic from the real world shit storm we live in.

In general people need to learn better aggressive interview techniques. Hostile/gotcha media has been around for at least as long as live interviews have been a concept.

You don’t have to be perfectly infallible or witty. Have two or three prongs of attack, a few different phrasings, and some rejoinders or counters to their likely responses.

Don’t bite with “did you just call this woman a man”, pivot to a different phrasing on the same question, keep hammering and don’t let them control the conversation.

Some faces have a strong jaw but that looks more like a jaw with a weak face

First, I think it’s stupid in general that we all think it’s fine to record people in public and upload their image so that it can be shared in perpetuity, no matter the setting.

Second, just because we live in a dystopian surveillance state doesn’t mean we should shrug and keep feeding the beast. If a state actor wants to track movements from 3 miles away and cross reference that footage with some other shadowy data then make them do that. It costs them time, resources and political capital that could be spent elsewhere. Don’t carry their water by donating data.

Third, there’s more malicious things that can be done with your image than just putting you on a list. Suddenly you get dragged into court and these close shots of you at a protest have been leveraged to inject you into a bloody riot or any other concocted scenario. A state actor has a ton of visual data but there’s no guarantee they have fresh, high resolution content on any given person (think anything that might have changed since your last photo ID: facial hair, thinning hair, scars, etc…).

Fourth, building off the last point, the state actor is not the only thing that matters in our threat model. Maybe some random xitter shitbag decides to use Grok to inject you into CSAM or some shit. That stuff doesn’t need to hold up in a court of law to ruin your life.

Even worse the MAGA nut from down the road recognizes someone and decides to take vigilante justice into his own hands. Hell, he might even be wrong and now some third party is dead for no reason.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to go black block to protests, I think there’s a ton of power in showing support openly to your neighbors and allies. But the message should be in the solidarity of the crowd and not the identities of the people. If you really want to shout “I’m not afraid of you” to the state then I’ve got good news: you can call up your senator or the Whitehouse right now from the comfort of your home!

But until we all can chill on the self doxxing then I probably wouldn’t show up anywhere sensitive without taking the basic steps to protect my privacy.

Can we please stop recording faces…

strong authentication which is open for unique human users only

Unless you completely ditch anonymity, this can only turn into a state captured propoganda platform. Whoever controls access/auth will have the keys to the content.

Neat, appreciate the source. None of that refutes anything in my source and in fact the two paint the same picture. Obama’s policy decision to formalize removals put more cases in the court docket. This (and other factors) put a massive backlog on reviews and they cut corners for the 80% of ostensibly open/shut cases.

Could Obama have done way better? Absolutely. But compared to the previous two administrations keeping things off book, it was still a step in the right direction to bring those to light in the formal process.

You keep saying “brunch” which I assume is to imply that everyone who’s mad now was blissfully unaware of any problems 10 years ago. Not only is that not true but it’s massively disingenuous.

DACA was a bandaid, but even as a gesture it showed an entirely different atmosphere around immigration and reform. Somehow Obama using his executive power to mitigate a problem is the same as Trump telling DACA kids to self deport while ethnically cleansing entire cities?

Gtfo you clown

They’re way past that already, try to keep up

Lmfao who’s ass did you pull that from?

I’m not an Obama Stan but the immigration policy was pretty tame during his administration.

There was a shift from voluntary removals (aka tossing them back over the border) to formal proceedings and a change to prioritize recent arrivals, those caught at the border and felons. By 2013, 87% of removals were in this top priority category.

So contrary to whatever edgy narrative you’re imagining in your head, immigration enforcement was nothing like this before.

What’s the logic with no ID? Biometric ID and surveillance data is advanced enough that you will get ID’d if you’re arrested/kidnapped anyway.

The vibe perfectly matches the business casual slacks and off brand sneakers

Again, the irony here is palpable. You clearly don’t know shit about history if you think the Qing dynasty wasn’t “getting way out ahead” of dozens of threats with the same ham fisted violence. That tends to work right up until it doesn’t.

Interesting to make the parallel of the inept, corrupt and teetering late-Qing dynasty to the modern CCP… Losing their grip on power via economic mismanagement and triggering a bloody civil war by lashing out at the people that fill the vacuum. Very bold stance for a tankie.

In the late 1840s, the movement at first grew by suppressing groups of bandits and pirates in southern China. Suppression by Qing authorities led it to evolve into guerrilla warfare and subsequently a widespread civil war.

So looking a fraction of an inch beneath the surface we find it’s like every other rebellion in history: a charismatic leader pitches a grass roots solution to the material problems of a neglected population, the population rallies and the state retaliates. This leader just happened to have a Christ-themed psychotic break.

If you read up more you’d find out how that Christian messaging was counter productive, generating resistance from both the traditional rural/Confucian population and the more modern/liberal upper classes.

Let’s start here:

Evangelical Christianity is a boogeyman, even in America. It’s true that there are some really, repressive, shitty congregations. These factions fabricate persecution, which is amplified by the conservative media empire into a general attack on all Christians in America. They then use this framing to hammer all sorts of wedge issues for partisan gains.

You can just look at public opinion polling on any topic: America has been trending more and more progressive on every issue right alongside the Christofascist capture of the USA. Participation in any organized religion is currently at an all time low in the USA (47%) and trending down. The Christian window dressing on the Orange Reich is not for popular appeal, it’s a dog whistle.

China is not the USA. There are a million reasons organized religion wouldn’t work as a political vector there.

For one, the CCP has a tight grip on the media in a one-party state. Just leave any enclaves of whiny Evangelicals alone and let them shout fabricated persecutions into the void. Let them have any quaint rituals or prayer groups or churches they want. Even if they want to wander from town to town handing out pamphlets, it would be an uphill battle because…

Two, China has never historically had organized religion or been very receptive to the concept. They don’t even have a native word for “religion”, and when one was invented it’s meaning quickly devolved into slang for “suspicious cult”.

If you care to look it up, you might notice that Christianity never got much of a foothold outside of colonial footprints. Even then, thousands of Christian missionaries and converts were being spontaneously massacred decades before the CCP even existed.

Since taking over, the CCP went from a very hard enforced state atheism to a focus on purging only foreign religions to a much more lax stance after the change to their constitution in 1978. Religious groups in China have always been a tiny minority and generally ostracized; the lifeline of an enshrined right to religion was a major progressive step:

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, social organization or individual shall coerce citizens to believe in or not to believe in any religion, nor shall they discriminate against citizens who believe in or do not believe in any religion. The state shall protect normal religious activities.

The general CCP idea of the time being that religion is vestigial and will wither away on its own; violent suppression is counterproductive.

Then there was a big change with Xi taking the reigns in 2012. Let’s review the official CCP stance on religion for party members from that time:

The Party will be divided ideologically and theoretically if members are allowed to believe in religion, as it means the coexistence of both idealism and materialism and of both theism and atheism, compromising the guiding role of Marxism.

To put it another way, the only allowable religion in the CCP (and thereby the future of China) is Marxism. The constitutional right to religion has been officially overruled, as any theism will be incompatible with the explicit end goal. This particular dogmatic view is in line with Xi-ism, and that dogma has been opaquely decided within the party. No transparency or public input, no vote, nothing…

This is what people mean when they say “red fascism”. All rights exist at the whim of the state and can be unilaterally revoked. One day you can practice your religion as agreed, the next day your “license” (a concept not hinted at in the constitution) is revoked and attending a service makes you a terrorist.

If the government can unilaterally cancel a citizen’s core rights, that citizen has the same power to divest the authority they grant to that government. Does that mean I agree with whatever “revolt” they’re calling for or whatever their religion professes? No. But it’s a pretty basic axiom of most political theory.

I’m not sure how trying to serve a couple of guys with an arrest warrant is an overreaction.

Right. Sure. Did you watch the videos? They were serving a couple of arrest warrants the same way that ICE shows up to a neighborhood with a couple deportation papers…

Ask the Branch Davidians.

Ah yes. Because not raising the national flag, displaying a cross, refusing to install security cameras, and having children at your services is the same as… checks notes …Shooting 20 cops over a 50 day siege.

To pull your card from a previous comment: this attitude is legalism.

Even if we assume the law is written as a good faith civic regulation and not a tool to discourage religious support networks and competing power structures to the ccp, what can it possibly achieve?

If the whole neighborhood wants to go to a service and there’s no adults left to babysit the kids, what else are they supposed to do besides take them? A child isn’t a pet that you can leave with a bone and a bowl of water.

And is not going to a community gathering going to “stop indoctrination”? These kids still live with their very religious parents and there are probably bibles, religious paraphernalia and religious friends all over their daily lives. Conversely, millions of kids are dragged to church services all over the world and manage to grow into productive, secular citizens or choose to discard their indoctrination naturally later in life.

That raises the question: do these people have the right to organize and operate their communities in a way that suites them or not? Was there any evidence of seditious organizing against the state? Were they in a cultist commune refusing to pay taxes and killing police? Or does the mere act of civil disobedience make them deplorable criminals that deserve any punishment the state decrees?

And further, does that punishment look to fit the crime? A civil offense (at best) causing no bodily harm to any other person results in police in military gear goose stepping down your streets and demolishing your church. Seems pretty goddamn similar to ICE kicking in civilian doors because their immigration status lapsed.

Why do you have a such a visceral reaction to one but a cool, impartial analysis of the other?.. 🤔

He is probably also personally a factor in the admin targeting Minnesota. Trump/MAGA was really, really outraged by his “weird” shtick during the campaign. Removing himself could be seen as Trump “winning”, and now MAGA is wondering why ICE is still fucking up a state purged of its corruption.

This should be the default in every city. Somehow these masked men with no badges keep killing people, finding out who the fuck they are and what they’re doing there should be automatic.

Who’s defending a fascist coup? The discussion here is about the powers of his office and his personal political sway. Despite the direction that American politics have been heading, no elected official in America is supposed to be a despot.

He’s not the guy personally answering a 911 call and telling his jack boots to suit up and crack heads. The law [currently] states that a group of protesters is not allowed to occupy a private hotel no matter how just or well intentioned their motives. Some low level pig took the call, some other pigs drove over, and the protesters got arrested for their demonstration. This is pretty cut and dry unless some new details come out about Mamdani directing a hostile response or allowing brutality toward the protesters.

What he has the ability (and responsibility) to do is pressure the DA to drop any charges. He can stump for legal changes that resist/impede ICE or replace mayoral appointments who show signs of supporting our fascist occupation. He can warn the police chief that any violence toward ICE protesters will put her out of a job.

He can’t disband the police force, eject ICE, and unilaterally usher in a socialist utopia. I guess either:

A. That reality is beyond the naive logic of the auth left or

B. That these articles and talking points are intentionally inflammatory for the sole purpose of causing infighting

Never ask:

• The USA why it has so many prisoners
• Saudi Arabia why they’re holding foreign worker’s passports
• China why the number of executions is a state secret